Victorian Government's past neglect of its water infrastructure

This was a #comment-209721">post in response to John Quiggin's article, Food of 16 Apr 2008 Where does the upstream water go? Most leaks from poor irrigation infrastructure, in Victoria! While building “centres” and generally spending on “things to get me elected” the infrastructure for irrigation on the Murray was neglected. While this was going on SA was piping its irrigation channels. Now the rest of Australia has to take up the slack. Now the Victorian government has the temerity to be drawing water from the Murray to supply Melbourne! Paying to pipe water 70 kms to Melbourne weirs while twice the water leaks to ground water in northern Victoria is madness. To further aggravate me open channels with their myriad faults, like evaporation being in the order of 6 feet a year, are denying the environmental flows, the Coorong is damn near dead. To top it off they got 1 billion dollars more in the latest handout to subsidise their inefficiency.